Obama Administration Again Asks President Putin to Expel Edward Snowden

In a move to save face or something to that effect, the Obama Administration has once again asked Russian President Vladimir Putin to expel NSA leaker Edward Snowden “without delay.”

National Security Council spokeswoman Caitlin Hayden: “We agree with President Putin that we do not want this issue to negatively impact our bilateral relations. While we do not have an extradition treaty with Russia, there is nonetheless a clear legal basis to expel Mr. Snowden, based on the status of his travel documents and the pending charges against him.”

I would bet that Edward Snowden has also squealed to the Russians about the NSA spying on them. He is in a race to save his own skin. He will do and say whatever it takes to stay out of America’s hands.

There is no other way to explain this, but all I can say is Edward Snowden kicked the U.S. in the butt in a major way, according to the Daily Beast:

Glenn Greenwald, the Guardian Newspaper journalist Snowden first contacted in February, told the Daily Beast Tuesday that Snowden “has taken extreme precautions to make sure many different people around the world have these archives to insure the stories will inevitably be published.” Greenwald added that the people in possession of these files “cannot access them yet because they are highly encrypted and they do not have the passwords.” But, Greenwald said, “if anything happens at all to Edward Snowden, he told me he has arranged for them to get access to the full archives.”

The fact that Snowden has made digital copies of the documents he accessed while working at the NSA poses a new challenge to the U.S. intelligence community that has scrambled in recent days to recover them and assess the full damage of the breach. Even if U.S. authorities catch up with Snowden and the four classified laptops the Guardian Newspaper reported he brought with him to Hong Kong the secrets Snowden hopes to expose will still likely be published.